Camp Nou seats with the slogan 'més que un club'. The fact is all football clubs are 'more than a club'. Photograph: Michael Regan/Action Images

This week two of the most bizarrely bloodless major transfers you could hope to see were decisively entrained. Amid scenes of absolutely no acrimony whatsoever, David Villa (already gone) and Cesc Fábregas (off soon) both pledged themselves to Barcelona, leaving Valencia and Arsenal looking a little bit like a man whose girlfriend has just been pinched by some entirely charming and handsome beret-sporting poseur who also manages to do a really good job of assuring them they should be feeling terribly flattered by all the attention. Barcelona are good at this. The most widely fawned-over of all clubs, theirs is a peculiar kind of velvet-glove imperialism. It is time someone took a stand on this. Mainly by breaking the omertà and pointing out that Barcelona are by some distance the world's most annoying football club.

Mainly it's to do with that sense of swooning self-love; not so much the idea but the manner in which they paint themselves as "més que un club". The fact is all football clubs are "more than a club". Yeovil Town are more than a club. Get over it.

Even more annoying, but related, is Barcelona's unshakeable conviction that they are intrinsically good. We are the ewoks here, they shriek. We are the Dukes of Hazard. Never mind that as a regional powerhouse they have such economic might they can even self‑righteously abjure shirt sponsorship (the Bono-style Unicef endorsement is also annoying. You keep thinking: just get Carlsberg on the phone and buy a proper centre-forward). No other football club anywhere insists with such needy, weepy fervour that you love it. This is cloying and I refuse to swoon.

Then there is Barcelona's cultural imperialism, a more subtle form of consumer home invasion than a shirt‑flogging friendly in China, whereby Barcelona instead style themselves as an elite product: the kind of brand adopted by people who feel they are above adopting brands. Barcelona are an iPod team, a vintage Japanese denim team; something undeniably good but also somehow tarnished by an accumulation of gloating approval. Naturally, with this in mind, it is easy to feel irritated by the manager Pep Guardiola, who is clearly bright and even nice but spoils this by looking like a swanky graphic designer, someone who might own a coffee table made out of barbed wire.

Above all I dislike their non‑contact tippy-tappy style of play, often deemed, like Barcelona themselves, to be intrinsically "good". I have a theory the popularity of this style owes a lot to the fact that it looks good on TV: a televisual style, suited to the armchair rhythms of possession-foul-replay-pundit-blather. It is so obviously and demonstrably high end. Oh look – a backheel! A dinky one-two! This is good football even if you don't really know that much about football, accessibly high spec like a £40 bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

But perhaps the most annoying thing is that so many players now feel bound to emote that it is "their dream" to play for them. It makes you wonder why Barcelona don't just franchise themselves in every country, a global Barcelona brand that might finally turn the world an annihilating shade of Barcelona; and where they can all play each other endlessly, untouchably good and pure. While the rest of us, Fábregas-less, are left to get on with our everyday bad football with its scruffiness and spikiness and enduring imperfections.